NATASHA

George Vernadsky and the linguistic theorist Roman Jakobson, were members of the group. Eurasianism was essentially a phenomenon of the emigration insofar as it was rooted in the sense of Russia's betrayal by the West in 1917-21. Its largely aristocratic followers reproached the Western powers for their failure to defeat the Bolsheviks in the Revolution and civil war, which had ended with the collapse of Russia as a European power and their own expulsion from their native land. Disillusioned by the West, but not yet hopeless about a possible future for themselves in Russia, they recast their homeland as a unique ('Turanian') culture on the Asiatic steppe.

The founding manifesto of the movement was Exodus to the East, a collection of ten essays published in Sofia in 1921, in which the Eurasianists foresaw the West's destruction and the rise of a new

civilization led by Russia or Eurasia. At root, argued Trubetskoi, the author the most important essays in the collection, Russia was a steppeland Asian culture. Byzantine and European influences, which

had shaped the Russian state and its high culture, barely penetrated to the lower strata of Russia's folk culture, which had developed more through contact with the East. For centuries the Russians had freely intermingled with the Finno-Ugric tribes, the Mongolians and other nomad peoples from the steppe. They had assimilated elements of their languages, their music, customs and religion, so that these Asiatic cultures had become absorbed in Russia's own historical evolution.

Trubetskoi drew on Russian geography, where the Eurasianist idea had a long pedigree. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the geologist Vladimir Lamansky had shown that the soil structure was the same on either side of the Ural mountains: there was one vast steppe stretching from the western borders of the Russian Empire to the Pacific. Building on the work of Lamansky, the Eurasianist geographer Savitsky showed that the whole land mass of Eurasia was one continuum in biogeographic terms. It was made up of a series of parallel zones that ran like ribbons latitudinally across the continent -completely unaffected by the Ural mountains - from the plains of Hungary to Mongolia. Savitsky grouped these strips into four categories - starting with the tundra of the north, followed by the forest, the steppe and then the desert in the extreme south. There was nothing exceptional in this geography, but it served as a sort of 'scientific' basis for more daring arguments about the Eastern influence on Russia's folk culture.

In his essay 'On the Higher and Lower Strata of Russian Culture' (1921), Trubetskoi set out to prove the Asian influence on Russian music, dancing and psychology. He argued that Russian folk music was essentially derived from the pentatonic scale - an argument he based on the observation of the simplest peasant songs. Folk dance, too, according to Trubetskoi, had much in common with the dancing of the East, especially that of the Caucasus. Russian dancing was in lines and circles, rather than in pairs, as in the Western tradition. Its rhythmic movements were performed by the hands and shoulders as well as by the feet. The male dancing was virtuosic, as exemplified by the Cossack dance, with heels hitting fingers and high jumps. There was nothing like this in the Western tradition - with the single exception of Spanish dancing (which Trubetskoi put down to the Moorish influence). Female dancing also showed an Eastern character, with great

importance placed on keeping the head still and on subtle doll-like movements by the rest of the body. All these cultural forms were seen by Trubetskoi as the Russian manifestations of a distinctively Eastern inclination for schematic formulae. This 'Eastern psyche' was manifested in the Russian people's tendency to contemplation, in their fatalistic attitudes, in their love of abstract symmetry and universal laws, in their emphasis on religious ritual, and in their 'udal' or fierce bravery. According to Trubetskoi these mental attributes were not shared by the Slavs in Eastern Europe, suggesting, in his view, that they must have come to Russia from Asia rather than from Byzantium. The 'Turanian psychology' had penetrated into the Russian mind at a subconscious level and had left a profound mark on the national character. Even Russian Orthodoxy, although superficially derived from Byzantium, was 'essentially Asiatic in its psychological structures', insofar as it depended on 'a complete unity between ritual, life and art'. For Trubetskoi this unity explained the quasi-religious nature of state authority in Russia and the readiness of the Russians to submit themselves to it. Church, state and nation were indivisible.¹⁵⁸

Such ideas had little in the way of ethnographic evidence to support them. They were all polemic and resentful posturing against the West. In this respect they came from the same stable as that notion first advanced by Dostoevsky that the empire's destiny was in Asia (where the Russians could be 'Europeans') rather than in Europe (where they were 'hangers-on'). Yet because of their emotive power, Eurasianist ideas had a strong cultural impact on the Russian emigration of the 1920s, when those who mourned the disappearance of their country from the European map could find new hope for it on a Eurasian one. Stravinsky, for one, was deeply influenced by the mystical views of the Eurasianists, particularly the notion of a natural Russian ('Turanian') inclination for collectivity, which the music of such works as The Peasant Wedding, with its absence of individual expression in the tinging parts and its striving for a sparse, impersonal sound, was Intended to reflect.¹⁵⁹ According to Souvchinsky, the rhythmic immo-bility (nepodvizhnost') which was the most important feature of Strav-insky's music in The Peasant Wedding and The Rite of Spring was 'Turanian' in character. As in the Eastern musical tradition, Strav-insky's music developed by the constant repetition of a rhythmic

pattern, with variations on the melody, rather than by contrasts of musical ideas, as in the Western tradition. It was this rhythmic immobility which created the explosive energy of Stravinsky's 'Turanian' music. Kandinsky strived for a similar effect of built-up energy in the geometric patterning of lines and shapes, which became the hallmark of his abstract art.

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'In their primitive habitat I found something truly wonderful for the first time in my life, and this wonderment became an element of all my later works.'¹⁶⁰ So Kandinsky recalled the impact of his encounter with the Komi people on his evolution towards abstract art.

The link between the 'primitive' and modern abstract art is not unique to the Russian avant-garde. Throughout the Western world there was a fascination with the life and art of tribes in distant colonies, of prehistoric cultures, peasants and even children, whose primal forms of expression were an inspiration to artists as diverse as Gauguin and Picasso, Kirchner and Klee, Nolde and Franz Marc. But whereas Western artists had to travel to Martinique or other far-off lands for their savage inspiration, the Russians' 'primitives' were in their own back yard. It gave their art an extraordinary freshness and significance.

The Russian Primitivists (Malevich and Kandinsky, Chagall, Gon-charova, Larionov and Burliuk) took their inspiration from the art of Russian peasants and the tribal cultures of the Asiatic steppe. They saw this 'barbarism' as a source of Russia's liberation from the stranglehold of Europe and its old artistic norms. 'We are against the West,' declared Larionov. 'We are against artistic societies which lead to stagnation.'¹⁶¹ The avant- garde artists grouped around Larionov and his wife Goncharova looked to Russian folk and oriental art as a new outlook on the world. Goncharova talked about a 'peasant aesthetic' that was closer to the symbolic art forms of the East than the representational tradition of the West. She reflected this symbolic quality (the quality of icons) in the monumental peasants, whom she even gave an Asiatic look, in such works as Haycutting (1910). All these artists embraced Asia as a part of Russia's cultural identity. 'Neoprimitivism

is a profoundly national phenomenon', wrote the painter Shevchenko. 'Russia and the East have been indissolubly linked from as early as the Tatar invasions, and the spirit of the Tatars, of the East, has become so rooted in our life that at times it is difficult to distinguish where a national feature ends and where an Eastern influence begins… Yes we are Asia and are proud of this.' Shevchenko made a detailed case for Russian art originating in the East. Comparing Russian folk with Indo-Persian art, he claimed that one could 'see their common origin'.¹⁶²

Kandinsky himself was a great admirer of Persian art and equated its ideals of simplicity and truth with 'the oldest icons of our Rus' '.¹⁶³ Before the First World War, Kandinsky lived in Munich, where he and Marc were the co-editors of The Blue Rider almanac. Alongside the works of Europe's leading artists, The Blue Rider featured peasant art and children's drawings, folk prints and icons, tribal masks and totems - anything, in fact, that reflected the ideal of spontaneous expression and vitality which Kandinsky placed at the heart of his artistic philosophy. Like the Scythians, Kandinsky at this time was moving